The future is great- Real time translators

In the quest of tech and innovation, the big tycoons often considered to be friendly foes, Google and Microsoft, each of them released supercalifragilisticexpialidocious 😛 extensions to their remarkable products! With the release of Skype Translator, Google couldn’t just resist itself without bringing on it’s own product in the market, Google Translate(an update)! But what’s so delighting about each of’em??

As we know of Skype being nifty at audio-video communications for over a decade, it has now crossed all the geographical barriers possible. We have around 300 million users as per the statistics(last recorded on 8/28/13) and now with the release of the Skype Translator this number is going to shoot triple! The new Skype allows you to communicate irrespective of the language you speak i.e. it does the real time translation of voice calls such that both users communicate in their own languages and the message is delivered in the best language the recipient comprehends properly. This has open up endless possibilities, moreover, it is pivoted on machine learning i.e. more it is used, more smarter it gets! Although it currently works between Spanish and English for a spoken word, it still supports 40+ text-based languages for instant messaging. It records conversations in order to analyze the scripts and train the system better. The calls are splitted into small snippets, anonymised and stored on Microsoft servers for word matching and further processing. While Skype Translator was about to reach the apogee, Google presented it’s recipe with a new spice. Despite of being a tyro in VoIP niche, it has made a phenomenal progress. It has announced to incorporate Google Translate in Google Hangouts with around a support of 80 languages(yes, just double!) including the quite abstruse ones like Welsh. It’s time to simply tap the mic to speak up in your language, then tap the mic again to tell it your another language and then it’ll recognize the two and you’ll be able to converse fluently and more naturally without further tapping.

And not just this, it has taken up the real time translation to next level of Word Lens. Now you can travel anywhere in the world, navigate easily to any street and understand any signboard in any language. Just pan your Camera(in Translate app) to the sign and whoosh! it’s all in the language you want! But the best thing about this is – IT CAN WORK OFFLINE! Well, these updates are for both Android and iOS, thus, storming up the number of users to more than 500 million over a month.

Well that’s a real time image translator

Wrapping up, I’ll say that we have taken quite a bigger step by achieving universal translators which have smashed down the language barrier and have allowed us to discover, connect and share ideas with anyone, anywhere in the world!